FIWARE as a Scalable Digital Twin Interface for DT Ecosystems: Benchmark and Limitations

Abstract

While there are many efforts to create interactive Digital Twins that use simulations and a centralized data model, the management of communication in a decentralized Digital Twin ecosystem is less researched. Such an ecosystem is essential, whenever complex systems need to be mapped to their virtual counterpart and there is a high functional dependency between parts of the system. This paper presents an entity-based approach to build up such an ecosystem of Digital Twins using decentralized data models. The communication of differently scaled systems are benchmarked to demonstrate the functionality of our approach. We show that the the implemented Digital Twin Ecosystem is capable of establishing interconnected subsystems by synchronizing entities at their domain borders using the FIWARE Orion Context Broker. We achieve low latency values for a moderate amount of boundary entities and subsystems. However, more work needs to be done to decrease the latency when using more than 20 systems with more than 100 boundary entities per system. The presented solution can be extended by providing more simulations, systems or entities within.